Kirpotin, Valerii Iakovlevich

Kirpotin, Valerii Iakovlevich 

Born Oct. 29 (Nov. 10), 1898, in Kaunas. Soviet literary historian and critic; Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1969). Member of the CPSU since 1918. Participant in the Civil War of 1918–20.

Kirpotin graduated from the Institute of the Red Professoriat in 1925. Between 1932 and 1936 he worked on the staff of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). He served as secretary of the organizing committee of the Union of Writers of the USSR between. 1932 and 1934. In 1956 he became a professor at the M. Gorky Institute of Literature. His work includes studies of Russian revolutionary democratic writers, research on Dostoevsky, and articles on contemporary Soviet and foreign writers and socialist realism. His interest usually centers on the aesthetic attitude and world view of the author, taking a psychosocial approach to the author’s personality. Kirpotin has been awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and several medals.

WORKS

Radikal’nyi raznochinets D. I. Pisarev. [Leningrad] 1929.
Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin: Zhizn ’ i tvorchestvo. Moscow, 1955.
F. M. Dostoevskii: Tvorcheskii put’ (1821–1859) [2nd ed.] Moscow, 1960.
Pafos budushchego. Moscow, 1963.
Dostoevskii v shestidesiatye gody. Moscow, 1966.
Razocharovanie i krushenie Rodiona Raskol’nikova. Moscow, 1970.
Vershiny: Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. Moscow, 1970.
Dostoevskii—khudozhnik. Moscow, 1972